Microsoft has unveiled a new hardware system called Brainwave that will allow developers to use high-speed artificial intelligence, by deploying machine learning systems onto programmable silicon. This would mean that performance could go beyond levels of current central processing units, with a lack of batching operations intending to help hardware to handle requests as they receive them.

Billed as a "major leap forward in both performance and flexibility for cloud-based serving of deep learning models," the real-time AI system uses ultra-low latency which would benefit cloud infrastructures that need to process live data streams. Using the field programmable gate array that Microsoft has been deploying, there would be no software used in the loop, instead serving DNNs as a hardware microservice and mapping one to a pool of remote FPGAs...

Microsoft ­­has added an important component to its public cloud, Azure Event Grid, which is a fully-managed intelligent event routing service that allows communication through the publish-subscribe model. Azure Event Grid provides lightweight infrastructure for applications to exchange messages. On one side, there will be sources that generate data and raise an event, and on the other hand, there are interested parties consuming the data by responding to these events.

Microsoft is integrating a variety of Azure services with Event Grid that acts as the event sources. An application subscribed to an Event Grid topic may be notified each time a new virtual machine is provisioned, or a new document is uploaded to cloud storage. It is really up to the application on what it does with this data...

As many of you in the technology industry are aware, in 1965, Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors producible within a silicon wafer could economically double every year. Although the doubling rate has been revised several times since then, the prediction has served as a target and benchmark for semiconductor technology growth.

Moore’s law has fueled exponential computing advancements over the last several decades. For example, we have seen microprocessors with a few thousand transistors and kilobytes of memory transform into multi-core server chips with billions of transistors, gigahertz clock rates, and equally impressive storage and networking capabilities...

Apple is no longer the darling of the tech world it once was. It used to be that if you wrote something that even mildly suggested problems at the company, you were subjected to howls of execration by a seemingly endless legion of Apple fan boys. Yet clearly, those days are now over.

Consider this. In just the last few weeks, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg called Siri stupid, Silicon Valley guru Steve Blank questioned the company’s vision in Harvard Business Review and Business Insider reported that people are now saying that Microsoft is more innovative than Apple. Ouch!...

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, announced recently at its Computing Conference that it will provide its artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and data analytics capabilities to two new cutting-edge developments in China, demonstrating its role as a leading driver of the country's technological advancements.

Initiated by the Hangzhou government, the “Hangzhou City Brain” is set to address the city’s urban living challenges. As the hub to consolidate data and provide real-time analysis, the “Hangzhou City Brain” will rely on Alibaba Cloud’s AI program “ET” and big data analytics capabilities to perform real-time traffic prediction with its video and image recognition technologies...

Intel says it has started shipping silicon photonics products based around a hybrid indium phosphide/silicon laser, and says that it expects the technology to eventually feature “everywhere” in data centers. Officially launching the platform at this year’s Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel’s general manager of data centers Diane Bryant claimed that the Californian chip giant was the only company building its silicon photonics around a laser directly integrated into the material. “We are the first to light up silicon,” she said, adding that products had been shipping since June. “We integrate the laser light-emitting material, which is indium phosphide, onto the silicon and use lithography to define the laser, to align it with precision.”

Cost, reach and density advantage

Bryant says that this yields a cost advantage versus other approaches to silicon photonics, which can involve tricky manual alignment, as well as longer reach and higher density. But she admitted that it had taken Intel a long time – 16 years to be precise – to transfer the technology from its research laboratories and into a full-blown product...

Huawei, a global ICT solutions provider, announced its latest channel developments in ‘Transforming Together 2.0’ for the Middle East during its Partner Summit 2016, taking place today at Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai, UAE. In addition, product updates will also be shared to embrace the digital era of the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.

Huawei’s ‘Transforming Together 2.0’ channel strategy is based on developing strong, collaborative partnerships to help end-users gain maximum value out of its solutions. Huawei is committed to building an ecosystem of partners to complement and provide compelling value propositions to businesses...

Having been following the technology industry since the dawn of the cloud age (which was, after all, only a decade or so ago) I've been privy to some pretty interesting conversations. Indeed, when it comes to the adoption of cloud, Gandhi's quote springs to mind: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I remember eight years ago or so sitting in a conference where large traditional technology vendors were busy telling people that cloud wasn't real, that it was dangerous, that no real enterprise could ever trust it. Fast forward a few years and with the increasing success of cloud vendors, the traditional organizations changed their tune and started slapping the word "cloud" on top of their existing products...

Microsoft may have found a solution for some of the cloud computing industry’s biggest problems by moving its clouds under the sea. The Redmond company on Monday released details about a prototype for an underwater data center. Throughout a one-year pilot, called Project Natick, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) built and submerged a 10-by-7-foot, 38,000-pound data center about a half-mile off the Pacific Coast.

As Microsoft's cloud business ­– which reached $6.3 billion in revenue during the most recent quarter – continues to grow, so does the company’s need to store data. Underwater data centers, Microsoft found, decrease cooling and power costs, use more renewable energy, reduce latency and can be set up more quickly...

IBM today announced that its inventors have received more than 400 new cloud patents in 2015. Furthermore, over the last 18 months, IBM has secured nearly 1, 200 cloud patents, bolstering the company’s ability to deliver innovative new cloud services, solutions and capabilities to clients across all industries. These new IBM cloud patents comprise a wide range of innovations, including enhancing and improving the speed of deployment and security of cloud data centers, as well as easing the management of cloud applications, storage and maintenance. The following are examples:

Patent #9, 015, 164: High availability for cloud server - A key attribute of a cloud computing environment is high availability. Aspects of the disclosed invention enable a cloud environment to take snapshots of virtual machines, which can then be used for recovery purposes...